Word: ehrlich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Letters (Abrams; 311 pages; $67.50). That is not the fault of Barbara Ehrlich White, a Renoir expert who has written a thorough and commendably lucid biography of the great French painter. The problem stems from the size of this magnificent book, which is every bit as big and heavy as it has to be to accommodate hundreds of sumptuous reproductions. They too, of course, distract attention from the text: voluptuous nudes, enchanted gardens, glittering portraits and skies filled to the brim with sunlight. Dedicated readers will learn that Renoir's long life was not as serene and untroubled...
...always, growing in intensity throughout the year, came the horrifying pictures of the apocalypse that war in the nuclear age would mean. Astronomer Carl Sagan and Biologist Paul Ehrlich warned a sober scientific
...study is actually two efforts, by cooperating groups of scientists, one headed by Cornell Astronomer and TV Personality Carl Sagan and the other by Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich. They presented their findings at the two-day Conference on the Longterm, Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War. It was attended by some 600 American and foreign scientists and environmentalists and addressed by satellite by four Soviet counterparts in Moscow. Among them: Evgeni Velikhov, vice president of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. The Soviets said they had independently come to roughly the same conclusions as the Sagan-Ehrlich teams...
Sagan and Ehrlich picked as their "baseline case" a 5,000 megaton war. (One megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT; the explosive power of all strategic nuclear warheads possessed by the U.S. and Soviet Union is thought to total 12,000 megatons.) The results of such a war: a cloud of dust and smoke weighing 1.2 billion tons rapidly envelops the Northern Hemisphere and swiftly swirls into the Southern Hemisphere as well, blocking out 90% or more of the sun's light. Surface temperatures plunge to an average of -13° F and remain below freezing for three...
...best, Ehrlich figures, small bands of hunters and gatherers would be left in the Southern Hemisphere. And life would have difficulty renewing itself even after the dark and cold lifted, because most of the protective layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere would have been burned off. Killer ultraviolet radiation would stream in from the sun, paralyzing even phytoplankton, the one-celled ocean plants that form the base of the ocean's food chain. The effects would be less ghastly-but still catastrophic-if fewer megatons were exploded...